Toolkit rationale

We hope this toolkit will help you build more resilient, sustainable communities of food that respect the principles of ecological resilience, social justice and economic viability from field to table to compost heap.

The process

As part of the toolkit, we provide suggestions about how to run a workshop in your community and we include ideas about how to define a vision for your community food system. We suggest ideas about who to include to make the process empowering and community-driven. We also have input about how to identify your resources and existing capacities as well as how to define where your challenges lie. We also give you detailed case studies of innovative examples of existing projects in Ontario. To identify the most useful examples for you, we scanned over 350 food projects across the province and conducted over 170 interviews. We then selected the 19 case studies (see report on case study selection).

We invite you to read the whole document or pick and choose what works for your community — we have tried to design the toolkit with both approaches in mind.

Our team

The team who contributed to this toolkit worked with the people in their food communities to develop this report. Together, we bring to the table voices of practitioners from across the province as well as faculty and students from eight universities. Everyone is deeply committed to creating regenerative and healthy food systems.

We hope this toolkit helps you on your journey to building more resilient food communities.